The Wednesday of Oculi
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In today’s Gospel text, our Lord speaks of how defilement comes from within. The scribes and Pharisees were obsessed with external obedience to the law and traditions of the elders. But Christ says that external obedience, or lip service, is not enough. Quoting Isaiah, He says:
These people draw near to Me with their mouth,
And honor Me with their lips,
But their heart is far from me (Matthew 15:8a).
The Lord is not merely after obedience. He is after your heart. He desires that you would know and love Him as He has revealed Himself in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. Christ has died to save us from the corruption of sin, which is a cancer that seeks to destroy our lives, both now and eternally. Therefore, Christ does not merely offer us forgiveness of sins and the hope of eternal life and then leave us alone to deal with the temporal effects of sin in the meanwhile. Through the process of sanctification, His Spirit seeks to conform us to the image of Christ. The development of virtue, then, is a key part of our sanctification wherein we are re-shaped from the inside out. It is with this in mind that we continue our consideration of Christian discipline and virtue.
Over the last four weeks (including today), we have taken up consideration of the four Cardinal Virtues. On Ash Wednesday, we discussed the virtue of temperance. Temperance can be simply defined as controlling pleasure. We live in a culture which, frankly, has very little time for this virtue. Everything around us is about maximizing pleasure. “If it feels good, do it” is an apt summary of our culture’s attitude toward life in general. But even the ancient pagans, such as the Greek philosophers, understood that unchecked indulgence in pleasure is not good. In other words, too much of a good thing can be, well, too much. In Christianity, we call this inordinate obsession with pleasure “idolatry” because it is fearing, loving, or trusting in something other than God. In this case, the idol is myself. And the fact of the matter is, when I fear, love, and trust in myself more than God, it typically doesn’t go well for me. This is true both on a secular level and on a Christian level, which is why our Lord commands the discipline of fasting. By fasting from things that are not sinful, we learn to fast from things that are sinful and thus to develop the virtue of temperance, which is the foundation of all virtue. For if one cannot say “no” to temptation, he will never grow in sanctified living.
Two Wednesdays ago, we discussed the virtue of justice. Justice means rendering that which is due to another person. There is, of course, the common conception of what is fair and right according to natural law and the laws of the land, which is a big part of the picture. But for a Christian, the virtue of justice begins with a right understanding of God and self. God is God; you are not. All that I have is a gift from Him. I have no right to demand anything from anyone. Therefore, justice is not about me. It is always about my neighbor—what are his needs and how can I sacrificially give to help him? And so, our Lord commands the discipline of almsgiving, which is sacrificially giving of yourself, so that we would learn to not become overly attached to earthly things, but rather that we would be generous toward others and depend upon God to meet our own needs.
Last Wednesday, we discussed the virtue of fortitude. Fortitude is doing the right thing in the face of fear. This virtue is intimately linked to suffering, which, because of the fall, is something that all people must sadly deal with. You will suffer—whether that suffering is a result of your own sinfulness or circumstances beyond your control—you will suffer. For the Christian, we seek to cultivate the virtue of fortitude so that in the face of suffering we learn to depend upon God, whose grace is sufficient for us and whose power is made perfect in our weakness (cf. 2 Corinthians 12:9). So it is that our Lord commands the discipline of prayer. And, yes, prayer is a discipline. Our synodical catechism explanation teaches that prayer ought to be done “regularly and frequently” (Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation, 2017, page 234). This necessitates a habit and routine of prayer. If we wait to pray until we feel like it, then we will be waiting a long time. But Holy Scripture teaches that we ought to pray regularly and frequently—even saying that we should pray “without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). This is because our God invites us to pray in His Word. He speaks first and invites us to respond. This orientation of the heart toward God in reading His Word and responding to it is the essence of prayer—a discipline which teaches us fortitude.
Today, we come to the final Cardinal Virtue, namely the virtue of prudence, which is a practical wisdom that acts. Prudence is unique in that it does not have a corresponding discipline commanded by our Lord. This is so because prudence is the culmination of the Cardinal Virtues. Indeed, developing prudence takes a lifetime, and it comes only to those who are temperate, just, and fortitudinous. Indeed, one may say that prudence is the culmination of human life, as ordained by God from the very beginning.
We know that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep (cf. Genesis 1:1ff). Then God began to shape the world, making order out of chaos, culminating in creation’s crown jewel: the man and his wife. But Genesis 2 tells us that the Lord God made a special home for the humans. He planted a garden called Eden, which means “paradise” in Greek. And at the center of the garden, He planted two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (cf. Genesis 2:9ff). Now these two trees were more than physical trees. They certainly were physical trees, just as Adam and Eve were physical people. But these two trees were more than physical, otherwise sin would not have come into the world through man’s trespass at the one tree. These two trees also possessed a spiritual reality. The tree of life was meant to teach that life is received from God—He is both life’s giver and sustainer. But for our purposes today, it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that is particularly important. It was meant to teach that God is the source of wisdom. How does one develop the knowledge of good and evil? By submitting to and receiving wisdom and prudence from the Lord. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s command and ate from the tree, they chose to define good and evil for themselves, and things went terribly wrong for them and for all of creation.
The Gospel for Sexagesima, which we observed three and a half weeks ago, teaches us about the development of prudence. In order for a plant to grow up and bear fruit thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold, the seed of God’s Word must be planted and cultivated. In other words, just as it was for Adam and Eve, so too is it for us. We live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (cf. Matthew 4:11). Therefore, true wisdom, or prudence, cannot be established and cultivated apart from God’s Word.
This may sound like theological jargon, but it is exceedingly practical. For the Lord desires to give wisdom to anyone who asks in faith (cf. James 1:5-7). But wisdom is not developed overnight. There is no “magic pill” for the cultivation of virtue. Just as diet and exercise take time to positively impact your health, so too does God’s Word take time to work and develop within you the virtue of prudence. But you will never develop prudence apart from God’s Word. This is why our three Lenten Disciplines are crucially important, for they all teach us dependence upon God and His Word.
In many ways, prayer is the chief Christian discipline. As we said before, we must develop the habit of prayer, for a life of prayer is rarely (if ever) cultivated by accident. And prayer, as we have said before, begins by listening to God, namely, by reading His Word. The Lutheran Reformers talked about reading God’s Word in two different ways: in a cursory manner and in deeper study. Both of these ways of reading Holy Scripture are important for the Christian. The Bible is a book of infinite depth, and yet there is immense value in a cursory reading—simply reading the Bible as you would a novel by immersing yourself in the story. The value of this way of reading the Bible is that the story of God’s work in history begins to shape your thinking as your become more and more familiar with it and it begins to shape your way of thinking, speaking, and acting. There is, of course, also immense value in deep study of Scripture, as traditional “Bible Studies” guide us to do. But most of us are familiar with this way of reading Scripture deeply in that context. I suspect we are much less familiar with the cursory approach to reading the Bible. If you have never read the Bible in a cursory way before, I commend it to you. Simply set aside 15, 20, or 30 minutes each day and pick up the Bible and read it continuously. Don’t stop to read footnotes. Don’t stop to look up a question. Just keep reading. If you want to keep a pen and paper handy to write down questions to revisit later, you could do that. But the point is to simply read the story of the Bible and slowly over time allow it to shape you. A good place to start this reading is with the Gospel of Matthew, working through the New Testament from there.
As we have said in weeks passed, the disciplines of fasting and almsgiving also have great value for teaching the Christian to depend fully upon God, which is the beginning of wisdom (cf. Proverbs 9:10). I would highly encourage you to take those disciplines seriously in your life. But if you don’t have a robust habit of prayer and reading God’s Word, that is the place to start. For it is through these disciplines that the Lord teaches us to walk in step with His Spirit who desires to cultivate fruit in us (cf. Galatians 5:16-26), including the fruit of prudence.
God grant it.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
